Buy new:
$38.12$38.12
Arrives:
Thursday, May 25
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $19.99
Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $17.20 shipping
+ $25.30 shipping
80% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) Illustrated Edition
| Price | New from | Used from |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
Purchase options and add-ons
Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise.
How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth."
Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate.
Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions, she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control, but "directed improvisation"―top-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials.
Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"―harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms.
Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.
- ISBN-101501700200
- ISBN-13978-1501700200
- EditionIllustrated
- PublisherCornell University Press
- Publication dateSeptember 6, 2016
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6 x 1.19 x 9 inches
- Print length344 pages
-
National Interests in International Society (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)Kindle Edition - HardcoverCurrently unavailable
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
- Hardcover$62.95Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
-
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
-
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
- Hardcover$113.87Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.
-
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
- Hardcover$56.28Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
- HardcoverCurrently unavailable
-
-
- Hardcover$56.95Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.
-
- Hardcover$57.95Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.
-
-
-
Currently unavailable : Currently unavailable titles are unavailable for purchase in this format.
Hierarchy in International Relations (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
Currently unavailable : Currently unavailable titles are unavailable for purchase in this format.
Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
Constructing the International Economy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
China's Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia's Developmental State (Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Hardcover))
Politics in the New Hard Times: The Great Recession in Comparative Perspective (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
The Power of Inaction: Bank Bailouts in Comparison (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
Varietals of Capitalism: A Political Economy of the Changing Wine Industry (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
Format unavailable : Format unavailable items are not offered in the selected format. Other format options may be available on the item's detail page.
National Interests in International Society (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)
1 or more items shipped or sold by sellers other than Amazon.com
Frequently bought together

- +
- +
What do customers buy after viewing this item?
- Highest ratedin this set of products
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global PovertyPaperback$15.57 shipping - Most purchasedin this set of products
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and PovertyDaron AcemogluPaperback$16.12 shipping - This item:
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)Hardcover$17.20 shippingOnly 18 left in stock - order soon.
The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little GoodWilliam EasterlyPaperback$15.81 shipping
China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know®Hardcover$16.94 shippingOnly 5 left in stock - order soon.
Editorial Reviews
Review
-- Peter Katzenstein Book Prize Committee, for "best book in international relations,comparative politics, or political economy."
"The first takeaway of the book, that a poor country can harness the institutions they have and get development going is a liberating message... This provocative message challenges our prevailing practice of assessing a country's institutions by their distance from the global best practice... The second part of the book is equally thought provoking. While adaptive approaches to development have become new buzzwords, Yuen Yuen's work brings rigor to this conversation... this analytical lens has enormous potential for thinking through the adaptive challenge, whether at the national level, subnational level or sectoral level."
--Yongmei Zhou (Director of the World Development Report 2017), World Bank Development Blog
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap... is an original and insightful take on what is perhaps the biggest development puzzle of my lifetime... Her unconventional insight is that the first challenge of development is to harness 'weak/wrong/bad' institutions to create markets... China wanted to begin a process of "adaptation" and for that they needed to create conditions conducive to "directed improvisation."... Professor Ang is making important advances in understanding how development can be made possible in her approach to Complexity and Development 2.0.
-- Lant Pritchett (Harvard Kennedy School), State Capability Blog
"Ang provides specialists and nonspecialists alike with a fresh inside-the-black-box account of how the Chinese state--from the center to the periphery, across time and space--has actually practiced (not merely preached) innovation, problem solving, and effective implementation... Future studies of bureaucratic life in China and elsewhere must reckon seriously with Ang's account; she has set an admirably high bar and capably filled a conspicuous scholarly vacuum. It is encouraging that the development policy community is also taking note... Her book is compelling, important, and deserving of a wide audience."
-- Michael Woolcock (World Bank), Governance
This book is a triumph, opening a window onto the political economy of China’s astonishing rise that takes as its starting point systems and complexity. Its lessons apply far beyond China’s borders... Ang reveals… [a system of] ‘directed improvisation’- a ‘paradoxical mixture of top-down direction and bottom-up improvisation’… I love this phrase, and it could easily become as prevalent and useful as Peter Evans’ ‘embedded autonomy.’ -- Duncan Green (Oxfam), LSE Review of Books
As if explaining modern Chinese economic development was not enough of a challenge, Ang has two even loftier goals. The first is methodological. She expresses a frustration with political science’s causality obsession and modeling approaches that deliver isolated snapshots of complex processes… Ang’s second ambition is to apply this coevolutionary schema to how we understand economic development generally. -- Edmund Malesky (Duke University), Perspectives on Politics
More unusual are political economy studies that formulate an argument about a recent economic development experience and argue that the principles explaining it are the same as those found in prominent approaches to economic history, thereby proposing an interpretation of economic history scholarship in light of more contemporary developments. Yuen Yuen Ang achieves precisely this with her new interpretation of China’s economic development path. Her key conceptual innovation is to bring complexity theory into the study of economic growth. -- Bin Wong (UCLA, History), Journal of Economic History
I had also not imagined that China, and its remarkable economic growth over the past four decades, would provide such a rich example of complexity principles in action. -- Keith Johnston, Cultivating Leadership Blog (New Zealand)
NAMED "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS
China's transformation cannot be attributed to a single cause; rather, it arose from a contingent, interactive process—Ang calls it 'directed improvisation.' She formalizes this insight by using a novel analytic method that she terms 'coevolutionary narrative,' which has the potential to influence future studies of institutional and economic change beyond China.
-- Andrew J. Nathan (Columbia University), Foreign Affairs
Review
In this major new contribution, Yuen Yuen Ang offers a fresh synthetic explanation for the stunning economic transformation of China in recent decades. She shows how China experienced sustained rapid economic development by transforming weak institutions in ways that strengthened states and markets simultaneously. This book points toward a potential model of growth for other countries and is a must-read for all scholars interested in explaining development trajectories in the Global South.
-- James Mahoney, Northwestern University, co-author of Advances in Comparative-Historical AnalysisAbout the Author
Yuen Yuen Ang is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before joining Michigan, she was Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
She is a winner of the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, the GDN & Gates Foundation international essay prize on the Future of Development, the Eldersveld Prize for Outstanding Research (awarded by the University of Michigan), and two Early Career Fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies.
Product details
- Publisher : Cornell University Press; Illustrated edition (September 6, 2016)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 344 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1501700200
- ISBN-13 : 978-1501700200
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.19 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,107,206 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #625 in Development & Growth Economics (Books)
- #1,768 in Asian Politics
- #1,954 in Economic Conditions (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Yuen Yuen Ang is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association for “impactful empirical, theoretical and/or methodological contributions to the study of comparative politics.” She is also named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for “high-caliber scholarship that applies fresh perspectives to the most pressing issues of our times.”
Ang's first book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), is acclaimed for its “game changing” and “field shifting" research on adaptive processes of economic-institutional change. It received the Peter Katzenstein Prize in Political Economy and Viviana Zelizer Prize in Economic Sociology, and was named "Best of Books 2017" by Foreign Affairs.
Her second book, China’s Gilded Age: the Paradox of Economic Boom & Vast Corruption, is released by Cambridge University Press in 2020. It was featured in The Economist, The Wire China, and The Diplomat.
Professor Ang was profiled in The New York Times, CGTN’s Visionaries, and the Chinese-language outlets, Jiemian (界面), Pengpai (澎湃), and CNPolitics (政见).
She holds a PhD from Stanford University.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
1) There's a growth vs. institutions dichotomy in development literature often posed in form of two statements - you first need growth to build institutions OR you need institutions to get growth. But no one asked - should it always be a dichotomy? Can growth and institutions co-evolve? This book raises this unquestioned question and answers that growth and institutions have always co-evolved historically. This may seem obvious statement but it isn't - a brief survey of development debates would tell you that. More than that, it's not just enough to make this statement. One has to prove it with some examples. Most of the hard work goes there. The author has gone into enormous details of China's growth story to make this point.
2) "Countries need adaptability" - This is another famous dictum in development. But no one asks - what conditions enables adaptability? This book raises this question and answers it, drawing lessons from China's story.
3) "Laundry list of reforms vs. All in reforms" - In general, the policy recommendations are made in form of a laundry list of steps that are to be taken. This presumes that there are few constraints, addressing which can lead to growth. This may not be a correct way to frame the question, what the author calls "complicated problem". Addressing few constraints will work if it's a system like a car, where few parts are to be repaired. But it needn't be applicable to what the author calls "complex problem". Complex problems are those where there are many unknown unknowns and where combinations of constraints can lead to new constraints. In such cases, one has to go for an all-in reform, where you have to make "incremental reform across wide range of connected domains simultaneously". If you do fragmented reform across only few domains, those efforts won't translate into outcomes. One has to do reform across wide spectrum of areas. This again may seem obvious but many miss it.
Overall, I highly recommend the book. It's a quick read and written in an engaging manner in simple language, accessible to a non-specialist reader. For those interested, here is a summary and review of the book on my blog (search for "iterative adaptation How China escaped poverty trap")
In today world economy, the man-make disaster and slow growth of the countries are still astute, and China is no exception but a typical example of it.
Thus, it is obvious that China's so-called success can barely be called a success but just long overdue of what it should be done long ago.
Top reviews from other countries
The role of weak institutions and how they become stronger is a common theme and the author provides a mountain of evidence with some very interesting and specific examples. How that strengthening is influenced by good leadership and by the development of organisational culture is key.
Of course, in all of this there is a view of China as a development outlier whose success is too specific to hold lessons for others. Like Yuen Yuen Ang I disagree with that and think there is lots to learn as long as we separate out the generic lessons from the ones with only “Chinese characteristics”.
It's well worth the effort : scholarly, readable and with a very clear and well supported argument.





